collaboration – Looking Forward

November 12, 2015

Why Is Government So Slow To Collaborate On Software?

Open source software is free and is often developed by collaborations
of volunteer programmers around the world, along with staff at big
companies who find it in their common interest that this software be
maintained.

Open source software has been an enormous success.
Most of the web services on the Internet are delivered by Apache
software on the Linux platform – both open source projects. Indeed,
there are over 25 million open source projects listed on the open source
directory of GitHub.

Despite the billions of dollars spent by the
public sector for software each year, the public sector’s share of
those open source projects has been much smaller than its share of the
overall economy. This small commitment to open source is not what you’d
expect considering the situation of the public sector compared to the
private sector.

First, unlike private companies, governments
cannot really consider their software to be proprietary and a key
strategic advantage in competing with others. Taxpayers have already
paid for the software and, like much else in government, it is supposed
to be open and available (unless security or privacy is at stake).

Second,
there are many programmers who would help to build and maintain public
sector software out of civic spirit and a recognition that they too
benefit as citizens.

Code For America
has been an outstanding example, but not the only example, of the
willingness of software developers to help even local governments. Ben Balter has been a champion for public sector open source as well. The GovCode
website proclaims:

“Code for your country! We believe in a government
of the hackers, for the hackers and by the hackers”.

[That’s hackers in
the good sense of creative, expert programmers.]

Third, open
source software is often much less expensive than commercial,
proprietary products and just as often better quality. This is
especially true in the public sector where many of the companies
providing products for various special purposes – like jail management or health –
aren’t very big themselves and thus their products are often constrained
or sometimes buggy.

It’s hard to come by the total
number of software developers in governments or total expenditures for
software development – or even packaged software where open source might
substitute. But considering how many government agencies there are, it
is likely that government at all levels has a lot more developers in total than these
companies.

Of course, in fits and starts, open source has come to government, with 2012-2013 a recent peak of interest.

The US Defense Department issued guidelines
for use of open source in that agency. And the US Federal government
has, officially, been an advocate for open source software – at least
within itself. It is not easy to determine what percentage of software
the Feds have actually shifted from proprietary to open source.

Also, a few years ago, the Open Source Institute
dedicated itself to

“promote the development and implementation of open
source software solutions within U.S. Federal, state, and local
government agencies.”

Alas, currently it seems to be in a quiescent
state.

More recently, Github has created a platform for public sector sharing. But much of what is being shared is data or best practices, not software.

It’s
worth noting that, despite the efforts of the former DOD CIO and groups
within the General Services Administration, like 18F, too little of that movement
has been the result of leadership from within the government. Most has
come from outsiders offering to help.

Most significant is this
nuance: even when there is interest, government policies on open source
are focused on using open source software developed elsewhere, like
Linux, and not necessarily contributing to that software or creating new
open source software.

A key missing element in the failure to
make open source development the standard approach in the public sector is lack of
collaboration among governments. This is hard to understand in an era
when public agencies are strapped for cash. Each public agency may have
only a small software budget. However, pooling their financial and human
resources will achieve a scale that could allow for the creation of
good, feature-rich software for all of them.

This collaboration
need not stop at national borders. For example, the requirements for
software to manage the vaccination of a population are very much
consistent in the public health agencies of many countries. Moreover,
several trends should make collaboration easier – the shift to cloud
computing, new forms of communications that can ease discussions among
developers and the decreasing cost of building software compared to
years past.

It is now possible for government technologists, with
support from citizens, to truly scale up their open source software
development efforts.

So what are public officials, especially
public sector CIOs, waiting for?

If you have the answer or, better yet,
suggestions on how to make public sector open source more widely
adopted, please let us all know.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/133033805117/why-is-government-so-slow-to-collaborate-on]

June 24, 2015

Collaboration vs. Competition For Economic Growth

Lots of talk about the economy focuses on how individual businesses compete. Generalizing from the situation of individual businesses, public officials who are responsible for the overall growth of their local economy also often talk about competition. Making their cities “competitive in the world economy” or enabling their “residents to compete" are frequent phrases you hear.

And they worry about where they stand in the competition with other cities.

Even in today’s global economy, the biggest cities still envision themselves as standing alone, in competition with all other jurisdictions.

And, of course, with cash, tax and other incentives, local economic development officials will try to steal – i.e., compete – with distant or even nearby jurisdictions.

Granted that sometimes the word “competitive” is used merely to mean prosperous or good or something else positive. But the use of the metaphor of competition can be misleading, even in those cases.

The fact that individual businesses often find themselves competing with
each other doesn’t mean that regions as a whole thrive by focusing on
competition with other regions.

Getting back to basics, an economy grows as people develop and exchange
specialized services/products and, in various ways, create new ideas and
services/products. The better connected and more collaborative the residents of a region are with everyone else, the more likely they are to be creating more wealth and income for themselves. This means that
overall economic growth of a region is much more about collaboration than
competition.

The value of collaboration has begun to be heard
in some parts of the economic development profession. For example, John Jung, Chairman of the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF), wrote “Collaborative Innovation – the New Competitive Edge for Economic Development”. From a conference on Global Competition and Collaboration in 2011, there was “New Building Blocks for Jobs and Economic Growth”. The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania affirmed this idea: “We Need More Collaboration And Less Competition For Economic Growth”.

Unfortunately, most of the huge global cities have not yet seriously adopted this approach. In contrast, an increasing number of smaller cities, towns and rural areas have come to the realization that they have a better future if they cooperate, collaborate and network.

An interesting example is Mitchell, South Dakota, which has 15,000 people, but was among ICF’s Top 7 Most Intelligent Communities this year — among cities like Rio, New Taipei and Columbus Ohio. They were in trouble a decade ago. They had lost 30% of their population, especially young people, like many other small communities in the countryside.

Mitchell turned that situation around. They have three Internet service providers that deliver gigabit bandwidth. They’ve seen the growth of tech companies and precision agriculture. Their unemployment rate is 3%, with hundreds of open jobs. Unusual for a small city, it has its own workforce development director.

At the recent ICF Summit in Toronto, Bryan Hisel, Executive Director, Mitchell Area Development Corporation, put it simply: “entrepreneurship is our way of thinking here.” So the leaders of Mitchell view their small size as an advantage, not a disadvantage. That entrepreneurial culture of its people came before they had broadband.

With that entrepreneurial spirit, you’d think that Mitchel is all about the competition. But Hisel pointed out that all the things people elsewhere have started to talk about — especially collaboration — comes naturally to small communities. So Mitchell has extended its service to nearby communities and even provides advice to small cities that others might see as competitors.

Perhaps the tradition of collaboration in parts of the countryside is also why there was increased interest at the summit in my proposal for a global virtual metropolis that connects small cities like Mitchell – a connection for economic success that arises from collaboration rather than competition with one another.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/122336332341/collaboration-vs-competition-for-economic-growth]

July 16, 2014

Online Collaboration Upending Old Ways?

This post is about some of the more interesting and unusual news items that provide continuing evidence of the way that online collaboration is upending old ways of doing things in several domains.

In the past, we’ve depended upon social and behavioral scientists, news media, and other authoritative figures to assess our collective emotional state. Now there’s the WeFeel project of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). As CSIRO describes it:

We Feel is a project that explores whether social media—specifically Twitter—can provide an accurate, real-time signal of the world’s emotional state.

Hundreds of millions of tweets are posted every day. … We Feel is about tapping that signal to better understand the prevalence and drivers of emotions. We hope it can uncover, for example, where people are most at risk of depression and how the mood and emotions of an area/region fluctuate over time. It could also help understand questions such as how strongly our emotions depend on social, economic and environmental factors such as the weather, time of day, day of the week, news of a major disaster or a downturn in the economy.

Another domain which has more obviously been dominated by experts is medicine. While many hospitals and physicians are still working out their systems for electronic health records and billing in a changed insurance environment, patients are not waiting. Nor are various businesses – as we are already seeing an onslaught of wearable devices to help people track health from both large established companies and startups.

Going beyond health tracking to health management and finding a way to bring in medical expertise when it’s really needed is the next step, although not a simple matter. But uMotif is tackling the issue. As they say:

Health systems across the world are under increasing pressure. The demands are rising, but resources often can’t keep pace. One way to help relieve the pressure is for people to engage more in their own health. Taking greater control, ownership and responsibility for keeping well.

[uMotif offers] Software for health self-management and shared decision making, supporting patients and clinicians; strengthening relationships; improving healthcare.

And then there’s the Longitude Prize, which was created in the 18th century by the British government. The winner had to create a workable way to determine a ship’s longitude.

In a sequel to that original prize, there is now in the UK a new Longitude Prize 2014. But instead of an official body determining the topic, this being the 21st century, the Longitude Committee used crowdsourcing and asked the public to submit ideas.

The public’s choice of a new challenge?

“In order to tackle growing levels of antimicrobial resistance, the challenge set for the Longitude Prize is to create a cost-effective, accurate, rapid and easy-to-use test for bacterial infections that will allow health professionals worldwide to administer the right antibiotics at the right time.

Reading this, many observers might make the traditional assumption that the challenge aims to encourage heavy thinking by experts in biology, disease, DNA and the like. But the Longitude Committee states right up front on their website:

Now that the antibiotics challenge has been chosen, we want everyone, from amateur scientists to the professional scientific community, to try and solve it.

Nesta [the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts in the UK] and the Longitude Committee are finalising the criteria for how to win the £10 million prize, and from the autumn you will be able to submit your entries.

I’ve previously described the success that Zooniverse has had in amateur science, but the Longitude Committee has upped the ante considerably by offering such a large prize. Good luck to all my readers!

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/91948911601/online-collaboration-upending-old-ways]

February 26, 2014

Zooniverse: The Next Wikipedia?

Nearly everyone who uses the Internet has heard of Wikipedia and likely used it at least once. Wikipedia has often been held up as the poster child for the way that the Internet enables people all over the globe to collaborate with each other and produce an incredibly valuable result.

While Wikipedia itself has had some growing pains – or is it maturity pains? – there have been other more recent examples of virtual collaboration.

One of my favorites – and a potential successor to Wikipedia as the poster child for virtual collaboration – is Zooniverse (https://www.zooniverse.org/ ). Recently, Zooniverse passed the 1,000,000 mark – that is more than a million people have registered to help out.

This is a large number that is even more impressive when you consider that Zooniverse is not a fan site or a fantasy sports site, but is all about the participation of “everyday people” in science.

Their projects range from analyzing data collected in space to biology, nature and the environment. They even have room for what might be considered scientific analyses applied to the humanities.

Unlike Wikipedia whose users vastly outnumber its contributors and whose rules specifically exclude original research, Zooniverse is intended to make everyone a volunteer and to create new science.

It’s a very ambitious goal, one that seems to be working well under the leadership of the Citizens Science Alliance (CSA). CSA describes itself as:

“a collaboration of scientists, software developers and educators who collectively develop, manage and utilise internet-based citizen science projects in order to further science itself, and the public understanding of both science and of the scientific process. These projects use the time, abilities and energies of a distributed community of citizen scientists who are our collaborators.”

It’s exactly this kind of project that provides hope for the positive value of the Internet as an unprecedented tool of the knowledge age.

And it also should raise the awareness of public officials about their citizens’ thirst for participation of all kinds.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/77908986686/zooniverse-the-next-wikipedia]

December 11, 2013

What Culture Is Needed For A Virtual Workforce?

A few weeks ago, the New York Times had a story about HP and its telecommuters – “Back-to-Work Day at H.P.” While not quite calling for an end to telecommuting as Yahoo done earlier this year, HP said they had added space and “invited” its employees back to the office. Once again it seemed that a big tech company was doing a decidedly untech thing – downplaying the use of technology and pointing out how it can’t really substitute for old fashioned patterns of interaction.

How do tech companies expect people to believe them, if their words don’t match their actions?

While the current technology for virtual interactions and a virtual workforce can certainly be improved, it’s not the major obstacle anymore. A more important part of the disconnect between words and actions is that these tech companies are engineering leaders, but not leaders in organizational culture – and it is culture that is the real hurdle here.

Tech and non-tech companies that want to ensure success for their virtual workforce need to build an appropriate culture and practices.

For example, everyone involved with telecommuting needs to understand that email, text, even phone calls constitute only a small part of the communications that human beings expect and is insufficient to support a high level of trust. However, video chatting does enable people to get much of what would be communicated in person and has been shown to enhance trust. So video ought to be the rule, not the exception, for virtual interaction.

Another important part of the culture of innovative companies is the encouragement of random interactions and collaboration among people. This is what underlies the Three C’s which Tony Hsieh of Zappo’s emphasizes: collision, community and co-learning.

He clearly believes that this is only possible in a physical environment. But these three C’s can also be well supported in a virtual environment, if the company sets up that environment for such collisions and makes it a part of its everyday culture. Indeed, the range of people who can interact easily in the virtual workforce is much greater than in a physical office.

The company also needs to ensure that telecommuters don’t feel their chance of career advancement is dramatically diminished unless they show up at the office and hobnob with the right executives. The article “Creating an Organizational Culture that Supports Telework” relates a good example of this situation, along with good general guidance on the positive actions that companies need to take.

In sum, as James Surowiecki wrote earlier this year in the New Yorker:

“At companies with healthier corporate cultures, it [telecommuting] often works well, and [former head of Xerox PARC] Seely Brown has shown how highly motivated networks of far-flung experts — élite surfers, say — use digital technologies to transmit knowledge much as they would in person.”

Building a 21^st century culture of successful virtual interaction won’t come easily to companies that developed their more traditional culture in the 20^th century. But in an increasingly virtual and mobile world, it will be necessary for the HPs, Yahoos, and others to flourish.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/69691956542/what-culture-is-needed-for-a-virtual-workforce]

May 24, 2012

Gotham Innovation Greenhouse Progress Report

G.I.G. is a group of creative folks from various fields who are trying to establish a 21st century version of the 17th century Royal Society – but with a deeper understanding of how innovation occurs and with the use of today’s collaborative technology.

A number of people have expressed interest in the progress of G.I.G. So I’ll be writing periodic updates here, especially after each meeting.

For the next few meetings, at least, people will be presenting various ideas/projects. Mostly these focus on what is called social innovation. Partly this is a reflection of the issues that the collaborators are interested in. Partly this is a reflection of the fact that we have not yet worked out the intellectual property and other economic issues that are part of commercial product innovation.

It was clear from the presentations that there are three types: presentation of an idea for enlightenment or fun (kind of a TED talk); a presentation which asks for feedback, but is pretty much limited to discussion at the meeting; and a presentation which is really an invitation for one or more G.I.G. collaborators to participate in the project being presented.

The second and third categories are much like presentations made by entrepreneurs to panels of venture capitalists or angel investors. Except in the case of G.I.G., the proposal presenters are seeking the creative ideas and energies of the other G.I.G. collaborators.

So last night, May 22, we had our second meeting, at which the following proposals were presented and discussed:

Leveraging FlexSpace to Power GIG, and vice-versa. This was presented from the beta FlexSpace room in San Jose to the group in New York. FlexSpace is an evolving set of technologies to enable distributed people to work together. The solution is designed to facilitate the creative process by enabling virtual post-its, white boarding, co-creation of content and a fascinating blending of physical and virtual space.
A real-time mobile logistics platform: to support on-the-fly coordination of large groups, while mitigating impact on other traffic. While initially focused on a bicycle event, this is potentially generalizable to all kinds of scenarios.
Open Line Studio: a collaborative distributed research studio about potential futures of waterfronts in Toronto, New York City, Bremen, Istanbul, and Busan. The project will serve as a proof-of-concept for intensive virtual sharing of physical plans as a way to improve local future-making.

There was also quite a bit of discussion about the process of innovation, how creative people can organize, etc. – all part of giving birth to G.I.G.

Our next meeting is Tuesday, June 19, where we will discuss additional projects/ideas.

Please let me know (njacknis@cisco.com) if you are interested in attending or participating in G.I.G.

We’ll also be working on enhancing the website and including the PowerPoints from this meeting.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/23640417438/gotham-innovation-greenhouse-progress-report]